We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThere may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
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A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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